I respond

The latest thing going around the atheistosphere is a list of questions on where atheists get their beliefs. This list helps define what atheism is to the individual atheist.

Funnily enough, and despite there being no dogma, there is a great deal of unanimity in the responses. In fact, far more unanimity than there seems to be within identical churches or from one xian to another. Dare I say it? My guess would be that our lack of dogma allows for simplicity...

So, here goes: My Answers in Atheism -

• Why do you not believe in God? From a rational standpoint, it doesn't make sense to believe in the impossible; and we have found no irrefutable evidence of one - only fanciful stories about him.

• Where do your morals come from? Simply from knowing that to be good, kind and ethical makes life easier for self and others.

• What is the meaning of life? Life has no purpose. But propagation of the species does. What we do with the time we are alive is more important to others, since we have no afterlife to look forward to.

• Is atheism a religion? No. No. And absolutely not!

• If you don’t pray, what do you do during troubling times? Living the Serenity Prayer makes the most sense: Can it be fixed? Then fix it. If it can't be fixed? Accept it with maturity.

• Should atheists be trying to convince others to stop believing in God? Yes. Encouraging people, actively or passively, to believe in a fantasy hinders their maturity.

• Weren’t some of the worst atrocities in the 20th century committed by atheists? No. They committed the atrocities for political reasons: to gain power and remove threats to it. The "leaders" were only incidentally atheists; their actions weren't to make more atheists. Coincidentally, religion has commited attrocities for religio-political reasons: to consolidate power, to maintain power and to remove threats to it - and to make more believers through terror.

• How could billions of people be wrong when it comes to belief in God? Because they were infected with the virus by their parents, starting in infancy. Religion is regional, tribal, and generational.

• Why does the universe exist? The more elegant question is: why does the universe allow man to exist?

• How did life originate? We don't know yet. But it's being investigated both vigorously and rigorously.

• Is all religion harmful? Yes. It holds a false promise of an afterlife. It has an authoritarian power over the people who follow it. It uses their money to glorify individuals (Pope! Robertson! Dobson!) and does little for poverty, disease and quality secular education. It keeps adults in a child-like state.
  

• What’s so bad about religious moderates? Because they stand as a bulwark protecting extremism by protecting and enabling the extremists. Both christianity and islam lean toward terroristic words and actions.

• Is there anything redeeming about religion? I can't think of anything.

• What if you’re wrong about God (and He does exist)? I'll take my chances, thanks. But I'm not worried.

• Shouldn’t all religious beliefs be respected? Not really. Why should it?

• Are atheists smarter than theists? Not necessarily smarter; but the fact is, the more education you have, the less you believe in god and the less you need faith. Atheism is not for the weak.

• How do you deal with the historical Jesus if you don’t believe in his divinity? In my opinion, there was no biblical Jesus; the bible passes off second-, third- and fourth-hand narrative as "eyewitness testimony". Trust me, in a court of law, Jesus would have no "corpus" to be "habeas-ed"! It's all circumstantial evidence. And borrowed from earlier myths...
  

• Would the world be better off without any religion? Yes. Everyone would be rated on their mature judgment and critical-thinking skills. And the money would be put to much better use.

• What happens when we die? The human body is a "wet-cell battery". When the electrical power dies, the body dies and consciousness winks out like a television screen that's been turned off. This concept is too scary for children and childlike adults.

So, that's one atheist's perspective. Feel free to take the questions and answer them yourselves.

The Parallax model: the genesis of the DI/IDiots

OMG! A book about "hoodwinking" the public? Biblical "literalism" has been done before? Say it isn't so!

At this point, Garwood's narrative becomes a study of how knowledge is produced and disseminated in a complex modern society. The flat Earth idea is proposed and promulgated in Victorian England by a colourful cast of con artists and eccentrics, the leader of whom is a quack doctor and snake oil salesman who calls himself "Parallax." He is a smooth debater and a clever self-promoter who leaves audiences dazzled; the real scientists who take him on have reason on their side, but no sense of how to communicate to a popular audience. Parallax plays the anti-elitist, inviting his audience to use their common sense and focus on the "facts" they all know, while leaving the speculative "theories" of establishment science in the dust. The round Earth, he declares, is merely a "theory" for which no actual proof has ever been found, and is a central part of a sinister conspiracy to undermine piety and true faith by a troop of atheistic scientists and their liberal, pseudo-Christian allies in the established mainline churches. And he's getting famous and making quite a lot of money with this stunt.

Is this all sounding familiar?

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From a book review, on The Vanity Press website, of Flat Earth: the History of an Infamous Idea, by Christine Garwood. She states, "Every educated person in the Middle Ages knew that the Earth was a sphere..."

Until the charlatans and con-men cribbed from the bibble - and so began "biblical literalism"!

It is not a coincidence that, simultaneously, Lamarckians and Darwinians were "shaking the foundation of religion" with critical examinations of "creation in just six days"...

Had we known about this before, we could be rolling our eyes and saying, "Here we go again!"

(Originally posted here.)